By Barbara Erling and Alan Charlish
WARSAW (Reuters) -Polish lawmakers voted on Friday in favour of a bill making it easier for security services to use weapons against migrants on the Belarus border, legislation that has public support but that critics say infringes human rights.
The debate pits Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-EU government against activists who had hoped he would abandon the previous, nationalist administration’s approach to the migrant crisis on the bloc’s eastern frontier.
Poland has been dealing with what it says is a form of hybrid warfare on the border since 2021, when large numbers of migrants started trying to cross illegally.
Both Warsaw and the EU say Belarus and its ally Russia have been orchestrating the crisis by flying in migrants from the Middle East and Africa, something Minsk and Moscow deny.
The situation took a tragic turn in June when a 21-year-old Polish soldier died after being stabbed through the border fence, provoking a wave of grief and anger.
Many Poles were also angered by news that soldiers who had fired warning shots on the border had been arrested and led away in handcuffs, an incident that cost a prosecutor his job.
The bill would allow security services to use force including firearms on the border in certain emergency situations.
Interior Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said it would send “a clear signal of support to people in uniform fighting aggression at the border”.
PUBLIC SUPPORT
An IBRiS survey for the Rzeczpospolita daily indicated that around 86% of Poles thought soldiers should be able to use weapons to repel migrants who use force.
However, activists expressed disappointment.
“I believe the government… stepped into the shoes of its predecessors because it was convenient,” said Marcin Wolny, a lawyer from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.
Human rights advocates say the bill may prevent proper scrutiny of incidents.
The government rejects such arguments, and Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz has said the migrants are not refugees seeking asylum but “hordes of bandits who… try to attack Polish soldiers”.
For Natalia Ciaston from the NGO ‘We are Monitoring’, such rhetoric paints a misleading picture.
“The narrative that these are dangerous criminals… is probably based on a few individual cases, such as the attack on a soldier, which of course should be condemned, but should not be projected onto all the rest,” she said.
($1 = 3.9472 zlotys)
(Reporting by Barbara Erling and Alan Charlish; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Gareth Jones)
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